I keep a running list of the books that I read all the way through–as opposed to read selectively in, which is how I approach most works of academic history, critical theory, and theology. For a few years I posted this list to my blog with commentary on some of the books. I fell away from that for awhile but am now getting back to it. I will be posting a list of all of the books I read over the last decade in the next week or so as well.

In 2019 I a read a bit in French because I was in France for awhile. I hope to read a bit of Spanish and French for pleasure in 2020 as well–though a month into the year I haven’t really gotten to either of them. My French reading level isn’t great and while I read a good portion of Pascale Tournier’s book “Le vieux monde est de retour, Enquête sur les nouveaux conservateurs,” I didn’t complete it. I did read several volumes of the delightful early French readers series Quelle Historie. They’re almost exactly at the level of French I can read without a dictionary.

In terms of books in English, the best novel I read was a translation of Soseki Natsume’s “I Am A Cat.” It is an early twentieth-century classic about the life of a cat who lives in the house of a somewhat eccentric minor Japanese scholar. The cat is witty and absurd and various passages find him doing such things as “worshipping my honored Great Tail Gracious Deity” and meditating on the ways cats “trod the clouds” because “[c]at’s paws are as if they do not exist.

Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” is an important work about the rise of dictator in the 1930s United States and the eventually successful efforts to overturn his rule. It isn’t great literature but its heroes are a Unitarian and a Universalist and it has some useful insights into the possibilities and limitations of liberal religious resistance to fascism.

Like Lewis’s book, much of what I read was for my Minns lectures. Daniel Walker Howe’s “The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861” and Juan Floyd-Thomas’s “The Origins of Black Humanism in America: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Harlem Unitarian Church” deserve special mention for their important work on Unitarian intellectual history. If you have heard me preach in the last twelve months these two works have been lurking somewhere in the background.

I didn’t read anything particularly bad in the 2019 but, as I discuss at length in my third Minns lecture, I was pretty disturbed by Timothy Synder’s complete elision of the US’s history of white supremacy in his “On Tyranny” and his attacks on anarchists and antifascists in “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.” For indigenous nations and many people of color the United States has been a totalitarian society since its inception. To pretend otherwise, as Synder does in his widely read “On Tyranny,” is exceptionally dangerous at a moment when some white people are waking up to the reality that they may soon be living in a totalitarian society. If we–and the we I am writing as here are what I might call white people of good hearts–are going to resist the rise of totalitarianism then we had better make allies with indigenous nations and people of color. They have, in many cases, successfully resisted this country’s totalitarianism for generations. We will be more powerful together and we–again writing for the plural white people of good heart–have much to learn from other resistance movements.

Synder’s scorn for antifascism and anarchism is ahistorical nonsense–his passages drawing equivalences between anarchism and fascism are particularly problematic. Here’s what I said on the subject in my Minns lectures:

Such equivalences marginalize the rich critical resources these traditions offer—[Hannah] Arendt herself was enamored with the anarchist celebration of “the council system” and critique of bureaucracy as a form “tyranny without a tyrant.” And they forget, as events in Charlottesville should remind us, anarchists and other antifascists have have played crucial, though often overlooked, roles in trying to contain various forms of totalitarianism. It was the anarchists in Spain who initiated the fight against the fascist coup to overthrow the Republican government. It was a Spanish anarchist tank division, serving the French Foreign Legion, which first entered Paris to liberate it from the Nazis. And today, anarchists in Rojava, the historically Kurdish area of Syria, have played a critical role in the defeat of the Islamic State.

That aside, when Synder isn’t attacking anarchists or fetishizing the state (as he does in a number of passages in both books) his work offers insight into the nature of totalitarianism, the machinery of death, and how both might be resisted. I certainly learned a great deal about the Holocaust from him and the parallels he draws between 1930s Germany and our present moment are important. However, Hannah Arendt remains by far the most useful critic of totalitarianism and fascism. And if you really want to understand the antecedents to our historical moment I suggest you read her “The Origins of Totalitarianism” instead (reading it alongside W. E. B. DuBois’s “The Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880” and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s “The Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” will really give you a complete sense of how the United States has gotten to the point it has).

So, after all of that, here’s my list for 2019:

Books Read in 2019

It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami
An Illustrated Guide to Japanese Cooking and Annual Events, Hattori Yukio
How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Neil Gaiman
The Professor’s Daughter, Joann Sfar
The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, Neil Gaiman
Paper Girls Deluxe Edition Volume 1, Brian Vaughan
Hope without Optimism, Terry Eagleton
I Am A Cat, Soseki Natsume
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Anxious Church, Anxious People: How to Lead Change in an Age of Anxiety, Jack Shitama
Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World, Otis Moss III
The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861, Daniel Walker Howe
The Origins of Black Humanism in America: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Harlem Unitarian Church, Juan Floyd-Thomas
Proverbs
The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation, Benjamin Moffit
Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History, Mark Harris
Catstronauts: Mission Moon, Drew Brockington
The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians, Anthony Wallace
English Traits, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus, 1511-1553, Roland Bainton
Power in the Pulpit: How America’s Most Effective Black Preachers Prepare Their Sermons, ed. Cleophus LaRue
John Calhoun and the Price of Union, John Niven
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Margaret Fuller
Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, Hannah Arendt
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder
The Complete K Chronicles, Keith Knight
On Tyranny, Timothy Synder
F Minus, Tony Carrillo
Assembly, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
The Stainless Steel Rat for President, Harry Harrison
Job
The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie
Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin
Quelle Historie: Angela Davis
Quelle Historie: Voltaire
No Name in the Street, James Baldwin
Quelle Historie: Histoire de France
Quelle Historie: La Socrellerie
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, Naomi Klein
Maroon Comix: Origins and Destinies, ed. Quincy Saul
Ruth
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, George R. R. Martin
More Power in the Pulpit, ed. Cleophus LaRue
Lamentations
Quelle Historie: Anne de Bretagne
Deathworld I, Harry Harrison
Ecclesiastes
Esther
The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, updated edition, Martha Nussbaum
Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, trans. Steven Carter
The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava, Thomas Schmidinger
Daniel
The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas
The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, Linda Gordon
Soft Science, Franny Choi
Deathworld II, Harry Harrison
Ezra
The Courage To Be, Paul Tillich
Disoriental, Negar Djavadi
Black Rights/White Wrongs, Charles Mills
American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals & Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice, Albert Raboteau
Nehemiah
Fall or Dodge in Hell, Neal Stephenson
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Angoulême is the largest city in the region where we’ve been staying. Over the last few days Gilles and Nicole have been showing us around. We’ve explored the Château de La Rochefoucauld and Sers. We’ve also visited a bunch of other places. Here are a few of the most interesting:

Musée de la Bande Dessinée

Also known as the International Comic Strip Museum, the Musée de la Bande Dessinée is located near the SNCF (high speed rail) train station. We saw a temporary exhibition on the relation between fashion and comic strips. I learned that Yves Saint Laurent made a graphic novel prior to ascending to the height of the fashion world.

The museum’s permanent collection is pretty neat too. It portrays a history of comic books (with a French focus) from the mid-19th century through the present day. As someone who was raised on Tintin comics, I appreciated the large selection of Herge’s work, much of which highlighted his early efforts at using the beloved boy reporter as a propagandist for reactionary politics and brutal colonialism.

Musée d’Angoulême

The other big museum in town features three floors of art and artifacts that stretch from the Neolithic to the present day. The collection highlights local artists and history. The historical materials are the most intriguing part. They stretch back to perhaps two hundred thousand years before recorded history and include everything from Neanderthal and early homo sapiens skulls to surprisingly complex tools from the Iron Age.

Looking at the menhirs and (virtual) dolmen on display was something of a spiritual experience. There’s a kind of emotional resonance, maybe I should call it awe, that I feel when I think about the ancient human urge to create systems of meaning. These giant stones were used for ritual purposes. I suspect that these rituals served much the same purpose that rituals in a contemporary Unitarian Universalist (or any other faith tradition) congregation serve—to enable people to feel part of something larger than themselves.

The middle floor of the museum is basically a tribute to French colonialism. It has a selection of beautiful pieces from North Africa, Central Africa, and Oceania that I can only assume were acquired under dubious circumstances. The top floor is dedicated to local artists from the fifteenth-century to the present. The work is almost entirely banal.

Far more impressive is the view of the roof of the Angoulême Cathedral that the upper floors afford. Standing on the inner stairwell, looking through the clear glass windows, I got an excellent view of the various gargoyles that line the roof. They were exquisite and almost certainly worth a trip to the museum on their own. 

Les Modillons

This space for art and ecology is run by Gilles and Nicole’s friend Catherine Mallet. Les Modillons is located in a beautifully renovated early nineteenth-century farm about 20 minutes outside of town and regularly features exhibitions by both local and national artists. Gilles exhibited there a few years ago. The gallery space is hands down one of the most beautiful gallery spaces I’ve ever been in. It’s in a converted barn, built in 1818. The rafters and original stone have been preserved throughout. For those looking for an excuse to visit to France, Les Modillons offers residencies for artists and environmental activists.

Les Freres Moine and Le Maine Castay

These are two local cognac distillers. We visited Les Freres Moine our first full day in Sers. We visited Le Maine Castay on our last. Le Maine Castay is managed by a close friend of Gilles and Nicole’s. They get much of their produce from his garden and most of their meat from his farm as well. He gave us a tour of the cognac facilities. It was on a different scale than Les Freres Moine and principally provides cognac to the big cognac brands that they blend, bottle, and sell. I saw massive wooden cognac barrels and learned that a single one contains about $360,000 worth of liquor. I also learned that making cognac is dangerous work. Every year a couple of people succumb to the alchol fumes and fall into a big vat or barrel and drown. We learned that this happened to one of Gilles and Nicole’s friend’s neighbors last year.

After our tour we were invited back to his house for dinner. It was a beautiful stone building. My son played with his cats and I got to drink his homemade pineau alongside some of Le Maine Castay’s champagne. We were introduced, in French, to some of his friends and family as “the Americans who don’t speak French.” I can understand enough French that I was able to more-or-less follow the French conversation. Everyone was incredibly friendly. It was a great last evening in France after a wonderful three weeks. Tomorrow we’re off to London. I plan to write at least one more post on France as we travel from Sers to Angoulême (by car) to Bordeaux (by train) to London (by plane).

The crisis in the United States keeps getting worse and worse. Today as I wandered through Arles members of my congregation in Houston participated in protests against President Trump’s planned ICE raids. His administration’s anti-human and anti-immigrant policies are part of the larger global crisis. I have been thinking about the crisis a lot since I have been in France. Much of the photography at Les Rencontres d’Arles is focused on the crisis. And my intention is to make it the major focus of congregational life when I return. I think that the moment we are in requires religious communities to confront it if they are to be faithful to humanity, God, and nature.

 Right now, though, I am spending my time in beautiful cafes in Arles drinking rose with my family. I guess that’s what privilege really is in the end, the ability to step outside or away from the world’s crises. And at this age, with my Harvard education, my many trips to Europe and on vacation in other parts of the world, my more than modest income, my significant cultural resources, and, of course, my skin color and citizenship status, I feel quite privileged.

When I return to the United States I will do my best to weaponize that privilege: preaching about the rise of totalitarianism, writing about white supremacy, organizing and attending protests and marches, attempting to develop and articulate spiritual practices and theological resources for confronting the intertwined economic, ecological, social, political, and, well, really spiritual crises humanity faces in these opening decades of the twenty-first century. But now, I just feel my privilege.

I feel it when I attend an exhibition like Philippe Chancel’s. His work emphasizes the global nature of the current crisis: the Republican destruction of the city of Flint’s municipal water system is seen as part of the same cycle of ecological destruction that is decimating parts of Africa or China. It is revealed to be a symptom of a political and economic class that is more interested in its own self-interest than in serving the needs of the vast majority of working people. While the conditions and the political systems are almost incomparably different Chancel is on point in his implicit comparison between a Michigan governed by Rick Snyder or a North Korea run by Kim Jong-un. In both situations the rich and powerful–the most privileged–are fine while poor and working people suffer.

In the midst of the global crises, I think that the for challenge someone like me is partly about holding onto my own humanity. In the end, privilege contains within it the possibility of shedding one’s humanity. I believe that there is only one human family and that we are all, ultimately, part of the same earthly community. Privilege is based on separation. The ability to step away from the experiences that most people have. And, well, in a world filled with refugees, economic exploitation, and many other kinds of discrimination and systematic violence, I feel quite privileged–which is to say separate and insulated–here in the South of France.

Dear Friends:

I hope that you’re excited about pizza and games tonight! Asa and I are looking forward to it. We’re bringing a few of our favorite games and one of Asa’s friends. It should be a lovely time in the fellowship hall. Our religious community doesn’t just exist on Sunday morning and gathering to share food and fun is just as important as worshipping together. It is a wonderful way to exercise one of the primary purposes of the church: bringing people together to share our lives. And what is more central to our lives than food and fun?

This month I am leading two worship services. The first is tomorrow and is titled “Intangible Dreams.” In this service we will consider how Unitarian Universalist congregations are places where we are free to imagine how the future might be different from the present. And we will ask: What shall we dream? What must we do to make those dreams a reality?

My second service for the month is on the 18th. In honor of Black History month, “A Black Christ” will prompt to us to ask: What would it mean if Christ and other images of the divine were imagined as black? 

The texts for both of my sermons from last month are now online. You can read “You and I” and “Two Bodies, One Heart” on my blog. 

I know that the national debate over immigration has been a concern for many of us over the last months. After the Trump administration announced that it would cancel Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadoran immigrants I posted a reflection I wrote on life in El Salvador after taking part in a human rights delegation in 2014. It is worth a read, especially if you would like to know more about why so many people from Central America come to the United States. You can read my piece “Fleeing a Culture of Violence” here.

Finally, I close with a poem from the poet Nikki Giovanni. We will be using it in worship tomorrow.

Revolutionary Dreams

i used to dream militant
dreams of taking
over america to show
these white folks how it should be
done
i used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis
i even used to think i’d be the one
to stop the riot and negotiate the peace
then i awoke and dug
that if i dreamed natural
dreams of being a natural 
woman doing what a woman
does when she’s natural
i would have a revolution

I look forward to seeing you soon!

love,

Colin

as preached at the First Parish Church, Ashby, MA, January 21, 2018

This week marked the year anniversary of the inauguration of Donald Trump. Shortly before he was inaugurated, I preached a sermon to a different congregation in which I said that one of our most important tasks for the coming years was to nurture the spiritual practices that would sustain us through difficult times. Today, as part of my two-sermon series on the self as social creature, I want us to consider one of those spiritual practices: the practice of friendship.

The image of an elderly Emerson, perhaps resting in dusty sunlight on an overstuffed armchair, asking his wife, “What was the name of my best friend?” is moving. It suggests that Thoreau’s name faded long before the feelings his memory evoked. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are not exactly the type of people I usually think of when I think of friends. Thoreau, the archetypical non-conformist, sought to live in the woods by Walden Pond to prove his independence. His classic text opens, “I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself… and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.” For Thoreau solitary life was permanent while life amongst his human fellows was but a sojourn, a temporary condition.

Emerson was equally skeptical about the social dimensions of human nature. In his essay “Self-Reliance” he claimed, “Society everywhere is a conspiracy against… every one of its members.” He believed that self-discovery, awakening knowledge of the self, was primarily a task for the individual, not the community. When he was invited to join the utopian experiment Brook Farm, Emerson responded that he was unwilling to give the community “the task of my emancipation which I ought to take on myself.”

Yet both of these men sought out the company of others. Emerson gathered around him a circle of poets, preachers, writers, and intellectuals whose friendships have become legendary. That circle contains many of our Unitarian Universalist saints. I speak of the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, of course, but also the pioneering feminists Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, the fiery abolitionist Theodore Parker, and the utopian visionary George Ripely. What we see when look closely at Emerson and Thoreau is not two staunch individualists but rather two men caught in the tension between community and individuality, very conscious that one cannot exist without the other.

Emerson wrote on friendship and in an essay declared, “I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we know.” Margaret Fuller’s tragic death, she was forty when she drowned at sea, prompted him to write, “I have lost my audience.” Emerson thought that Fuller was the one person who understood his philosophy most completely, even if they sometimes violently disagreed. Of her he wrote, “more variously gifted, wise, sportive, eloquent… magnificent, prophetic, reading my life at her will, and puzzling me with riddles…” Of him she wrote, “that from him I first learned what is meant by the inward life… That the mind is its own place was a dead phrase to me till he cast light upon my mind.” Perhaps Fuller’s early death is why Emerson recalled Thoreau, and not her, in the fading moments of his life. But, no matter, a close study of their circle reveals an essential truth: we require others to become ourselves.

The tension between the individual and the community apparent in the writings of our Transcendentalists leads to contradictory statements. Emerson himself placed little stock in consistency, penning words that I sometimes take as my own slogan, “…a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Let us consider Emerson the friend, rather than Emerson the individualist, this morning. If for no reason than when Emerson was falling into his final solitude he tried to steady himself with the memory of his great friend Thoreau. Emerson himself wrote, “Friendship demands a religious treatment.”

Have you ever had a good friend? A great friend? Can you recall what it felt like to be in that person’s presence? Perhaps your friend is in this sanctuary with you this morning. Maybe you are sitting next to them, aware of the warmth of their body. Maybe they are distant: hacking corn stalks with a machete, sipping coffee in a Paris cafe, hustling through Boston, caking paint on fresh stretched canvas, or driving a taxi through Mumbai’s mazing streets. I invite you to invoke the presence of your friend. Give yourself to the quiet joy you feel when you are together.

Friendship is an experience of connection. Friends remind us that we are not alone in the universe. We may be alone in the moment, seeking solitude or even isolated in pain, but we are always members of what William Ellery Channing called “the great family of all souls.” If we are wise we learn that lesson through our friends.

Again, Emerson, “We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.” Such dreams and fables can become real, they can become, “the solidest thing we know.” Seeking such relationships is one of the reasons why people join religious communities like this one.

When I started in the parish ministry it took me awhile to realize this. In my old congregation in Cleveland we had testimonials every Sunday. After the chalice was lit a member would get up and share why they had joined. Their stories were almost always similar and, for years, I was slightly disappointed with them. The service would start, the flame would rise up and someone would begin, “I come to this congregation because I love the community.”

“That’s it?,” my internal dialogue would run. “You come here because of the community? You don’t come seeking spiritual depth or because of all of the wonderful justice work we do in the world? Can’t you get community someplace else? If all you are looking for is community why don’t you join a book club or find a sewing circle? We are a church! People are supposed to come here for more than just community! Uh! I must be a failure as minister if all that these people get out of this congregation is a sense of community!”

Eventually, I realized that community is an essential part of the religious experience. The philosopher William James may have believed, “Religion… [is] the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude,” but he was wrong. Religion is found in the moments of connection when we discover that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Life together, life in community, is a reminder of that reality. People seek out that experience in a congregation because of the isolating nature of modern life. In this country we are more alone than ever before. Just a few years ago, Newsweek reported that in the previous twenty years the number of people who have no close friends had tripled. Today at least one out of every four people report having no one with whom they feel comfortable discussing an important matter.

Congregations like this one offer the possibility of overcoming such a sense of isolation. We offer a place for people to celebrate life’s passages and make meaning from those passages. Friendship requires a common center to blossom and meaning making is a pretty powerful common center.

Aristotle understood that friendship was rooted in mutual love. That love was not necessarily the love of the friends for each other. It was love for a common object. This understanding led him to describe three kinds of friendship: those of utility, those of pleasure and those of virtue, which he also called complete friendship. Friendships of utility were the lowest, least valuable kind and friendships of virtue were the highest kind. Erotic friendship fell somewhere in between. Friendships of utility were easily dissolved. As soon as one friend stopped being useful to the other then the friendship dissipated.

It took me until I was in my twenties to really understand the transitory nature of friendships of utility. I spent a handful of years between college and seminary working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. I worked for about a year at on-line bookstore. When a recession hit there were a round of lay-offs and, as the junior member of my department, I lost my job.

Up until that point I spent a fair amount of social time with several of my colleagues. We would have lunch and go out for drinks after work. I enjoyed the company of one colleague in particular. I made the mistake of thinking that he was really my friend. He had a masters degree in classical literature. Our water cooler conversations sometimes revolved around favorite authors from antiquity, Homer and Sappho. “From his tongue flowed speech sweeter than honey,” said one. “Like a mountain whirlwind / punishing the oak trees, / love shattered my heart,” said the other. Alas, when I lost my job a common love of literature was not enough to sustain our relationship. My colleague was always busy whenever I suggested we get together. Have you ever had a similar experience? Such friends come and go throughout our working lives. Far rarer are what Aristotle calls friendships of virtue. These are the enduring friendships, they help us to become better people. Congregational life provides us with opportunities to build such friendships.

The virtues might be understood as those qualities that shape a good and whole life. A partial list of Aristotle’s virtues runs bravery, temperance, generosity, justice, prudence… Friendship offers us the opportunity to practice these virtues and, in doing so, helps us to become better, more religious, people. The virtues require a community in which to practice them.

Let us think about bravery for a moment. The brave, Aristotle believed, stand firm in front of what is frightening not with a foolhardy arrogance but, instead, knowing full well the consequences of their decisions. They face their fears because they know that by doing so they may achieve some greater good.

Seeking a friend is an act of bravery. It always contains within it the possibility of rejection. Emerson observed, “The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.” I have often found, when I hoped for friends, that I need to initiate the relationship. I need to start the friendship. I am not naturally the most extroverted and outgoing person. Many days I am most content alone with the company of my books or wandering unescorted along the urban edges–scanning river banks for blue herons and scouring wrinkled aged tree trunks for traces of mushrooms.

But other people contain within them possible universes that I cannot imagine. My human fellows pull me into a better self. And so, I find that I must be brave and initiate friendships, even when I find the act of reaching out uncomfortable or frightening. Rejection is always a possibility. I was rejected by my former colleague. Rejection often makes me question my own self-worth. When it comes I wonder perhaps if I am unworthy of friendship or of love. But by being brave, and trying again, I discover that I am.

Bravery is not the only virtue that we find in friendship. Generosity is there too, for friendship is a giving of the self to another. Through that giving of the self we come to know ourselves a little better. We say, “I value this part of myself enough to want to share it with someone else.”

We could create a list of virtues and then explore how friendship offers an opportunity to practice each of them. Such an exercise, I fear, would soon become tedious. So, instead, let me underscore that our friends provide us with the possibility of becoming better people. This can be true even on a trivial level. A friend visits: I take the opportunity to make a vanilla soufflé, something I had never done before but will certainly do again. We delighted in its silky sweet eggey texture. It can also be true on a substantive level. A friend calls and reminds me I should try to make the world a better place. I recommit to justice work and march to oppose white supremacy and racial hatred.

How have your friends changed your life? Emerson and Thoreau certainly changed each other’s lives. And I know that the two men, whatever their preferences for individualism, needed each other. I half suspect that Emerson’s tattered memory of his friend, “What was the name of my best friend?” was actually an urgent cry. As Emerson disappeared into the dimming hollows of his mind Thoreau’s light was a signal that could call him back into himself.

I detect a similar urgency in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem to Marianne Moore: “We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping, / or play at a game of constantly being wrong / with a priceless set of vocabularies, / or we can bravely deplore, but please / please come flying.” Whatever was going on in Bishop’s life when she wrote her friend the most pressing matter, the strongest tug of reality, was that she see her friend. Surely it is an act of bravery to admit to such a need. Truly it is an act of generosity to wish to give one’s self so fully.

Let us then, be brave, and seek out friends. Such bravery can be a simple as saying, “Hello, I would like to get to know you.” Let us be generous, then, and give ourselves to our friends, saying, “I have my greatest gift to give you, my self.” Doing so will help us to lead better, more virtuous, lives and may draw us to unexpected places and into unexpected heights.

I have been more than a little negligent in keeping this blog up to date. Trying to complete my PhD in five years has been keeping me busy (also my computer died, and I’m currently reduced to working on my iPad, but that’s another story). I have a lot of professional news to share. Rather than breaking it into a bunch of small posts I decided to share everything in one swoop. 

First, and foremost, I am currently being considered for the Assistant Professor of Unitarian Universalist Theologies and Ethics at Starr King School for the Ministry. I had a campus visit on Tuesday and had the opportunity to meet with the faculty and many of the students. I’ll be giving a version of my job talk as a sermon at the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Wayland, MA this Sunday. If you’re in the area and curious about how I understand the challenges facing Unitarian Universalism you should stop by.

Second, I have had three papers accepted at academic conferences and will be presenting them in the upcoming months. Towards the end of May I will be in Toulous, France for the French Association of American Studies. There I will be presenting a synopsis of my dissertation currently titled “‘Onward, Christian Soldiers:’ American Social Movements and the Religious Imagination in the Wake of World War I.” In mid-June I will give “A Time To Grow Our Souls: Grace Lee Boggs Conceptions of Class” at the How Class Works conference at Stony Brook. Finally, this year at the American Academy of Religion my paper “Marcus Garvey and Cultural Apocalypse” will be part of a panel co-sponsored by Comparative Approaches to Religion and Violence and Secularism and Secularity titled “Sovereignity, the Secular, and Violence.”

I am pleased to announce that I will be returning to the Unitarian Church in Fall River on March 6th. 

Doing some archival research today in A. Philiph Randolph and Chandler Owen’s socialist paper The Messenger I came across this gem which I couldn’t resist sharing:

On the application blanks of Harvard University this year are the these questions: (1) What is the Race and Color of applicant? (2) What is his religious preference? (3) What change, if any, has been made since birth, in his own name, or that of his father’s?

It might easily be a Ku Klux questionnaire. The question about race and color being designed to excluded Negroes: the question of religious preference designed to exclude Catholics; and the question of change of name being calculated to find out Jews who have taken on Gentile nomenclature. Has the Imperial Wizard captured fair Harvard? Who knows?

from “Fair Harvard,” The Messenger, November 1922, 518

I realize it is a bit late, but I thought I would go ahead and publish my list of books read in 2015. As in the past, this is the list of all of the books I read to completion, page-by-page. It doesn’t include another 100 or so books that I spent some period of time looking at for scholarly purposes.

In 2015, thanks to the prompting of Charles Petersen, I read Elena Ferrante’s fantastic Neapolitan novels. They are some of the best works of fiction I’ve ever read and certainly superior to anything else I read for pleasure last year. The novels both have a cosmopolitan universality and particularity to them that seems capable of speaking to a variety of experiences. Robert Bolano’s “The Savage Detectives” was also great and everyone should read, or should have read, Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man” (which I was lucky enough to teach this year) and Junot Diaz. It probably is unnecessary to write this but I read Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s work for my dissertation, it was awful, and it made me more sympathetic to conservative and Augustian descriptions of the inherent wickedness of human nature. Dixon was a racist f**k, his literature did enormous harm, and you should only read him if you must.

In the realm of non-fiction I want to lift up DuBois’s “The Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880.” It is the single most important work of American history. I have read it twice now and will probably read it again this spring as I prepare a lecture on African American memories of Reconstruction. If you haven’t read it you need to. Now. Before you read anything else. It will help you understand the deep structures of American white supremacy and how and why capital is always racialized. As an equation Du Bois argues, building off Marx, that: the exploitation of black and brown bodies + the exploitation of the planet = white wealth.

The only really terrible things I read this past year were works by Dixon or other white supremacists. Some of my son’s books were questionable but they didn’t rise to the level of the truly awful.

The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
Spy Academy: Black Tie Spy, George Glass
The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand
Saga, Vol. 4, Brian Vaughan
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel, Jeff Kinney
The Leopard’s Spots, Thomas Dixon, Jr.
Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination, Robert Abzug
Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Carl Schmitt
Political Theology, Carl Schmitt
Fellowship of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans, Kadir Nelson
Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, Simon Critchley
The Concept of the Political, expanded edition, Carl Schmitt
Amulet: Prince of the Elves, Book Five, Kazu Kibuishi
How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, Joy Harjo
A Bear Called Paddington, Michael Bond
March: Book One, John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, Heinrich Meier
Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, Carl Schmitt
Asterix the Gaul, René Goscinny
Meaning in History, Karl Löwith
Labor Struggles in the Deep South & Other Writings, Covington Hall
Billy Sunday Was His Real Name, William McLoughlin, Jr.
Asterix and the Golden Sickle, René Goscinny
Asterix and the Normans, René Goscinny
Catullus, The Complete Poems, trans. Guy Lee
The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Philippians
Occidental Eschatology, Jacob Taubes
To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, Jacob Taubes
Usagi Yojimbo 27: A Town Called Hell, Stan Sakai
Usagi Yojimbo 28: Red Scorpion, Stan Sakai
Usagi Yojimbo Saga Volume 1, Stan Sakai
Ephesians
The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, Gopal Balakrishnan
Bone: Tall Tales, Tom Sniegoski and Jeff Smith
Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume, Jeff Smith
The Clansman, Thomas Dixon, Jr.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Hegel and Modern Society, Charles Taylor
Bone: Rose, Prequel, Jeff Smith
The Traitor, Thomas Dixon, Jr.
The Klan Unmasked, William Simmons
The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Susanna Clarke
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano
Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy, Helen Fielding
By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolano
Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska, trans. Joanna Trzeciak
This is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Collection Volume 1, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird
Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, W. E. B. Du Bois
Usagi Yojimbo Book 6: Circles, Stan Saki
Someday We’ll Be Ready, and We’ll Be Enough, Jeremy Louzao
Drown, Junot Diaz
Cane, Jean Toomer
American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, Matthew Avery Sutton
Papers Read at the Meeting of Grand Dragons, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, Church and Labor, Pasquale Russo
Bill Haywood’s Book, Bill Haywood
Saga, Volume 5, Brian Vaughan
Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor: Book One, Jon Scieszka
The Phenomenology of the Spirit, G. W. F. Hegel (trans. A. V. Miller)
We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World, Melvyn Dubovsky
The Shooting Star, Herge
Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World, Catherine Keller
Home to Harlem, Claude McKay
Banjo, Claude McKay
All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks
Negro with A Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey, Colin Grant
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, Audre Lorde
Modern Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Goosebumps: The Haunted Car, R. L. Stine
Race and Reunion, David Blight
The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante

I’ve justed accepted an invitation to lead worship on November 15 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Lynn.